


A Magister By Any Other Name

by BenevolentErrancy



Series: Blood Magic, Slavery, and a Fruit Basket [2]
Category: Dragon Age - All Media Types, Dragon Age II
Genre: Gen, Humour, let's be honest this is crack
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-05
Updated: 2015-12-05
Packaged: 2018-05-05 03:41:02
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,827
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5359742
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BenevolentErrancy/pseuds/BenevolentErrancy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Varric's cousin writes to welcome the newest member of Tevinter high society and government, Magister Fenris [redacted]<br/>[aggressively redacted, with malice]</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Magister By Any Other Name

“Oh shit,” laughed Varric.

It was only with hesitation that Hawke turned his gaze away from the game currently in progress to look towards where Varric sat at his desk. Everyone was several glasses into a particularly combative round of Wicked Grace between himself, Fenris, Isabela, and Anders, which meant that turning your head away for a moment upped the likelihood of Isabela cheating quite substantial, especially since Varric, one of the only people regularly able to catch her in the act, was sitting the round out in order to tackle some letters that had been piling up on his desk. (The fire in the room roared merrily, fed heartily on letters from the Merchant's Guild that Varric hadn't even bother breaking the seals on.) Still, when Varric said “oh shit” and laughed like that it was a pretty equal toss up over whether it was going to be relatively benign or possibly life threatening. It was usually best to pay attention.

“Is this a 'my second cousin once removed is marrying a nug and I'm invited to the wedding' sort of 'oh shit', or is it more of a 'Meredith has finally lost the last vestige of sanity she was clinging to and Kirkwall is burning' sort of 'oh shit'?” Hawke asked.

“She still had any? At this point I thought we were all just pretending for appearance's sake,” Anders muttered into his cards but was ignored as Varric spoke over him.

“Ha, neither. And yet also a surprisingly pleasing mixture of both, actually. Hey Broody, did you and Blondie ever get through the entirety of that 'welcome to the Magisterium, feel free to pick up your complimentary sinister moustache and blood mage cloak' letter?”

This, of course, immediately had Anders and Isabela snickering at the automatic look of disgust that flashed across Fenris' face every single time this was mentioned. It had scarcely been a week since the letter had come and no one was by any means near finished exhausting the potential jokes yet.

“No,” said Fenris sullenly. “For all his insistence, the mage can't read Tevene worth a damn. I can't figure out what in Andraste's name he's trying to say.”

“Hey,” said Anders defensively. “ _You're_ the great and powerful magister. Go pay some clerk to follow you around and read your mail if you don't like it.”

Fenris' glare was withering.

“It hardly matters anyway, I have no intention of ever setting foot there again,” said Fenris as he slapped his cards down with a sense of finality.

“Of course, of course, it's just, see, I _have_ got a letter from my cousin, as it happens. Though she isn't married to a nug. Well, depending on who in the family you ask that might be debatable. She _is_ a magister though.”

“Your _cousin_ is a magister?” said Fenris with the tone of someone who had just found out a dear friend was sick with plague and that he may or may not have been coughing on you.

He wasn't the only one surprised either.

“What the fuck, Varric?”

“You _must_ be joking.”

“The Imperium has _dwarven_ magisters? I thought you had to be a mage to be a magister – present company excluded, of course.”

“Well,” said Varric, turning fully in his seat to face the room, “as I understand it you don't _technically_ have to be a mage to be a magister, it's just sort of... a happy coincidence that they all are.” Fenris snorted at that. “And my cousin isn't a dwarf – she's my cousin by marriage, actually, she was married to my cousin Thorold. She is very much a mage, believe me.”

“Delightful,” muttered Fenris. “What does this have to do with me?”

“Right, well, so she decided to write me to express her appreciation for my somehow being complicit in throwing the entire Magisterium into chaos without doing a damn thing. Apparently half the Magisterium is laughing right along with the rest of us because they think this is a hilarious _fuck you_ to Danarius what with the whole 'letting the slave he created, hunted, and was ultimately slaughtered by take his seat as magister, hurr hurr evil magister laugh' thing, and the other half is going out of their minds because an elven ex-slave just became a magister, whoops. Trust me, Mae is having the time of her life.”

“I'm so happy she approves,” Fenris deadpanned.

“Not so fast, I haven't gotten to the best part yet. The part you and Anders clearly missed in that little letter of yours. Right, so how are magisters chosen? Anyone?”

Everyone immediately turned to Fenris who sighed exasperatedly. “They are chosen from the Circles, the Chantry, and the major families in Tevinter, often through inheritance but they can also be posted by the Archon.”

Varric's grin widened. When no one else showed any sign of getting the great joke he gestured desperately to them. “Well, Fenris isn't from the Chantry, and he's definitely not from a Circle, right?”

“What, Fenris _isn't_ a Chantry lay brother? I've been so terribly mislead,” said Isabela, clutching her chest.

Fenris' eyes had gone wide though. “No,” he said.

“I'm afraid so.”

“ _No._ ”

“Does anyone want to share?” demanded Hawke.

“Mae asked me to pass her best wishes onto the newly appointed Magister Fenris of House Dana–”

With a growl Fenris launched himself across the table, sending cards and drinks flying (and making Hawke, Isabela and Anders yell out in annoyance – particularly when a total of two Angel of Death cards fluttered to the ground in Fenris' wake of destruction), and made a grab for the letter in Varric's hand. Varric made a half-hearted attempt to hold it out of Fenris' reach, but sitting down he didn't really have space or arm's length to accomplish that so he quickly relinquished it and let Fenris glare down at Maevaris' sharp, neat writing, mouth moving silently as he searched for anything to suggest that this was some sort of trick of Varric's part.

“There has to be some mistake.”

“When it comes to politics Mae doesn't make mistakes,” said Varric earnestly. “Trust me. From the sounds of it since Danarius didn't have any heirs and, yadda yaddda something to do with the apparent Tevinter 'head in a box' clause you stumbled across, you legally take up the mantel as head of House Danar–”

Fenris snarled and balled the letter in his metal-clad fists before lobbing it into the fire, ignoring Varric's protest. “I will personally see all of Minrathous on flames before I am  _ ever _ called Danarius.”

“Well,” called Anders from where he and Isabela were retrieving the cards, “you are a magister now. Do you think you could make a motion for that? A 'this place is an irredeemable trash heap and can only be cleansed by holy fire, put the entire damn country to torch' bill?”

“If that were possible Kirkwall would be burning by now,” Hawke sighed.

-

“Magister Fenris, might I join your assembly?”

The look Fenris cast Hawke was exasperated but resigned, the joke had been going on long enough at this point that he had at least stopped throwing things at the head of anyone that made a jab about it.

“We can't just let in any riff-raff without an appointment,” called Isabela from where she sat with her feet propped on the table. “Have some respect, _soporati_.”

Fenris' eye roll was so exaggerated that Hawke was genuinely concerned he was going to hurt himself.

“Have you been learning new words, Isabela?” asked Hawke, pulling up a seat next to Fenris, who was muttering something that sounded rather rude in Tevene.

“We all have, actually,” offered Merrill, who was sitting next to Isabela. “We've been helping Fenris with them.”

“ _You've_ all been helping _Fenris_ ,” said Hawke carefully, considering the table's occupants. Besides for Fenris himself, there was Isabela, Merrill, and Anders. Not the first group that Hawke would ever expect to see Fenris go to for help. “Dare I ask what with?”

“They're the only ones that know more than one language,” said Fenris.

“Magister Polyglot has particular tastes,” said Isabela sombrely. “We're to become his harem of talented tongues.”

“As I recall this was all your idea actually,” said Anders from where he was flipping through a very large, very dusty tome.

Isabela shrugged. “What can I say, I _do_ like talented tongues.”

“We're helping Fenris come up with a new name,” explained Merrill.

“...What's wrong with 'Fenris', exactly?” asked Hawke.

“Not _that_ one,” grumbled Fenris.

“From what we can tell, because of head-box Tevinter weirdness Fenris has already been formally, I don't know, signed in, I guess, to the whole upper echelons of Tevinter society shit and is stuck being a Dan– stuck being labelled in a certain house that _we all know the name of_ but which I'm not allowed to say,” said Anders, tapping the book he had open. “But there's this whole ridiculously convoluted bit down here that basically means that the name of the house can be changed if a more suitable name is found and approved of blah blah blah extenuating circumstances blah blah blah.”

“Aveline found that passage,” said Merrill, “and she seems to actually understand the book, so we think it's accurate.”

“Besides for the fact that it doesn't look like it's been updated since the Storm Age,” muttered Fenris.

“Hey, I thought weird, archaic loopholes were kind of what you had going for you,” said Anders.

“Okay,” said Hawke, “but that looks like it's written in Trade. _Legal_ Trade, which hardly counts, but Trade. ...Why the harem?”

“To think up a name for Fenris' new house!” said Merrill.

“We figured House 'Fuck-The-Magisterium-And-All-It-Stands-For' isn't quite subtle enough to get accepted,” said Isabela. “But then we thought, well, if we can find an appropriate way to say that in Rivaini or Ander...”

“Ander has so many dialects most Anders can't figure out what we're saying to each other half the time,” Anders agreed cheerfully. “No way some isolationist Magister would catch it.”

“I'm still partial to using Qunlat,” mused Fenris, considering a sheet of paper that had a long list of foreign words and phrases with “Magister” scratched in front of them. “Even if some of the magisters understand it, it might get through without being caught until it's too late and then when it  _is_ noticed...”

“Or elvhen,” said Merrill. “It is your heritage after all and it would make a statement about slave rights, wouldn't it?”

Fenris just grunted at the suggestion that elvhen had anything to do with his heritage.

“So you guys have been holed up in this back corner of the Hanged Man discussing offensive phrases in different languages that Fenris could take as a name for the past hour,” said Hawke, “and you _didn't_ invite me? I thought I meant more to all of you. Show me what you have so far, I know some weird Nevarran curse words.”

 


End file.
